Quotes from Barry Lopez

There is not the raw material in the woods, or beyond, to make all of us rich. And in striving for it, we will only make ourselves, all of us, poor.

But it is not good to forget, not to face squarely, what happened

if, in measuring our love, we feel anger, I think we have a further obligation. It is to develop a hard and focused anger at what continues to be done to the land not so that people can survive, but so that a relatively few people can amass wealth.

When we enter the landscape to learn something, we are obligated, I think, to pay attention rather than constantly to pose questions.

To consider that the honeybee and the wild horse have their own integrity and perhaps even their own aspirations, and can no longer be viewed as subjects, willing to participate in the construction of a world built to serve the needs and desires of human beings alone.

so that what is left of what we have subjugated might determine its own life.

recognize in these photographs the resilience, determination, and concern for the fate of humanity that these photographers possess. And I would ask you further to consider how integral to American Geography is the idea of an ensemble of work like this. While there is individual genius behind many of these pictures, it is the community of artists, the absence of overbearing individual sentiment, that stands out here.

You can sit for a long time with the history of man like a stone in your hand. The stillness, the pure light, encourage it.

The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes once wrote that it was impossible for his country and the United States to have a productive conversation. Mexico, he said, is so burdened by its past it cannot easily imagine a future. The United States, he said, is so intent on imagining its future it isn't troubled by rewriting its past to serve that future.

Each place is itself only, and nowhere repeated

To eliminate diversity would be like eliminating carbon and expecting life to go on.

we have a way of talking about beauty as though beauty were only skin deep. But real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness in order to understand what beauty is.-Barry Lopez, Interview with Bill Moyers, Journal, April 30, 2010

We're cautious. How many people do you know whose crying out is for intimacy? They want to be known. They want to be touched. But they can't make that intimate connection without being vulnerable. You have to be vulnerable in order to achieve this exchange of intimacy. And you can't be vulnerable unless you can trust the situation. And what we're learning, many of us, is the world is not trustworthy enough for you to be vulnerable to it and gain that intimacy.

There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.

find a way to build with language a bridge between a failure to believe and a witness to what is incomprehensible.

The most intelligent thing we can do is love, not reason.

The opposite of love is not hate; it's indifference. To be indifferent is to not express love.

My faith is in my colleagues. And when I meet other writers, journalists, who've been doing this for a long time, trying to make us aware of what it is that we're living in, I put my faith in those people.

It does not demean men to want to be what they imagine the wolf to be, but it does demean them to kill the animal for it.

When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I'm trying to do. I'm frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.

real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.

We simply do not understand our place in the universe and have not the courage to admit it.

Throughout the centuries we have projected on to the wolf the qualities we most despise and fear in ourselves.

If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.